Outstanding Paper Prizes for Experimental Gerontology

Elsevier, the publishers of Experimental Gerontology, is announcing the establishment of a series of prizes for the best papers published in the journal.

Recipients of the Outstanding Paper Prize will be selected on an ongoing basis throughout the year. As well as receiving a prize, winning papers will be made freely available online on ScienceDirect.

Dr Thomas Johnson, Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Gerontology, said, "We think it is extremely important to recognize the contribution of outstanding researchers in the development of the field of ageing, and we hope this new Outstanding Paper Prize will give such authors a higher profile and the recognition they richly deserve. We also hope that by making these Outstanding Papers freely available online, we will be providing increased visibility and ready access for the best research."

The selection of the Outstanding Paper Prize will not be dependent on measurable factors such as numbers of downloads or numbers of citations. This is partly because this would mean waiting until the manuscript had already been out for some time before making the award and allowing complete access to the winning papers. Moreover, many have questioned the relevance of such indices anyway.

Impact Factors, in particular, sometimes seem not to be geared towards journals which have a long cycle. Some important studies have a longer 'lag time', so that their importance is recognized by citations only after a few years. So, while use of a readily available index would be simpler in some ways, it has been decided instead to make the choice a matter of editorial decision.

The Section Editors of the journal will propose papers they feel are eligible for the prize at the point that they are accepted for publication. These will then be voted on by all the Section Editors with the Editor-in-Chief having the final decision. Once a decision has been reached by the Editors, the award will be announced as soon as the final version of the paper is available online. In this way the latest research can be recognized quickly and made freely and immediately available to all, rather than waiting a year to review articles retrospectively.

There are no formal guidelines for selection. All papers published by the journal are eligible for this award. The Editors will be nominating papers based on their importance, innovation, relevance, and quality of science. The prize is open to all papers, both those in regular issues and special issues. Authors and readers are asked not to nominate particular papers.

The first paper to be so honored as a recipient of an Outstanding Paper Award is that of Alysia Vrailas-Mortimer, Rosy Gomez, Harold Dowse, and Subhabrata Sanyal, entitled “A survey of the protective effects of some commercially available antioxidant supplements in genetically and chemically induced models of oxidative stress in Drosophila melanogaster”, Experimental Gerontology, 2012 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2012.06.016).